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PASADENA, CA - AUGUST 5: MSL Flight director Keith Comeaux, right, celebrates with Martin Greco after a successful landing inside the Spaceflight Operations Facility for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover at Jet Propulsion Laboratory on August 5, 2012 in Pasadena, California. The MSL Rover named Curiosity is equipped with a nuclear-powered lab capable of vaporizing rocks and ingesting soil, measuring habitability, and whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbe. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

If Mars were churning out dime-store novels, they would arguably read more like the slow-burn mysteries of Raymond Chandler than Elmore Leonard.

They might even represent a literary sub-genre where NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover makes a good $2.5 billion robotic stand-in for Philip Marlowe and where sometimes the cold hard facts seem a bit convoluted. But following its triumphant landing inside Gale Crater, Curiosity is set to do at least two years of planetary sleuthing that should finally crack the code on the mysterious red planet’s earliest history.

To learn more about how NASA is making it happen, Forbes.com turned to Rob Manning, the Mars Science Laboratory’s (MSL) Chief Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena.

What is the most underappreciated aspect of executing and operating a robotic Mars mission of this scale?

The twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity were “faster, better, cheaper” on steroids. From a single power point presentation to launch, they were done in three years and a month. Years roll by and Mars Science Lab comes along and we were not as steeped in how to run a big business model. So, we suffered from growing pains in becoming a big project and organizing several hundred people at JPL and beyond to communicate effectively. Each piece of this rover was so complicated that it forced these [different] teams to be really separate from each other. So, there are still large swaths of the [different] teams that have never met.

How does the weight of the mission’s $2.5 billion cost affect your day to day operations?

One of my challenges is trying to balance the risk of doing something with the risk of not doing something. In a smaller project like Mars Pathfinder, I would constantly take actions to mitigate risk and to make it better. With a larger budget, there is a much stronger emphasis on risk avoidance. A lot of people worry that taking an action, particularly if they mess it up, could result in disaster. So, before I walk into a room to argue for action, I need to come much more “loaded for bear.”

Has the actual operation of Curiosity been different than expected?

It’s been better than hoped. But this mission was less forgiving. We had to get this vehicle into a tight corridor to land at Gale Crater. So, we had to squeeze out every last bit of capability to make sure it got there precisely on target.

Mars Science Lab Chief Engineer Rob Manning Credit: NASA JPL/Caltech

What aspect of the rover’s technology on the surface is at the most risk of operational failure?

The robotic arm and that whole system of electronics and mechanical motors and gears that transfer something like a half of an aspirin-sized bit of powder from inside a rock into one of the rover’s two instruments. We had enormous problems with sample transfer on the Mars Phoenix Lander. So, we’re under no illusions that Curiosity is going to get it right the first time. But we have given ourselves a big tool kit of ways to mitigate problems.